Monday, January 26, 2009

Some things I've been reading

Here are links to some things I've been reading recently. First, three essays on literary biographies that can be usefully read against each other, and which cumulatively give a sense of the rewards and the pitfalls of the form:

Robert Alter on Nili Scharf Gold's biography of Yehuda Amichai ("Gold's study illustrates what a bad idea it is to reduce a great writer to one or two explanatory formulas"); Lewis Jones on two new biographies of Samuel Johnson, which have as their competition one of the earliest and greatest literary biographies ever written, Boswell's Life of Johnson ("Bernard Malamud maintained that all biography is fiction, which may well be true. It is certainly true that no two biographers agree completely, and every biography is stamped with the character of its author); and, most fulfilling of all, Alan Hollinghurst's review of Sheldon Novick's Henry James: The Mature Master (In the end -- by which I really mean soon after the beginning -- you are faced with a problem that can affect literary biography more sharply than other kinds: a writer is writing about a writer. One sensibility is at the mercy of another in a shared medium. No one would want a life of James written in Jamesian. But something sharp-eared, responsive, and self-aware should ideally show itself in the biographer's style and approach").

7 comments:

Thanks a lot for sharing the article by Sheldon Pollock. I had read earlier about the deciphering of Ashoka's inscriptions by James Princep in "The Code Book", oddly enough a book on cryptography, by Simon Singh. I think we have this really bad habit of losing our way and having an outsider point out our mistakes. Hope we manage to set things right this time.

How ironical that pleas to revive scholarship and interest in and practice of historical and modern Indian languages are voiced in English. Of course one must recognize the meta-irony and the meta-meta-..-meta-irony inherent in this comment.

Uncertain - Differently from you, I don't see the slightest bit of irony in this. Is there any other way in which Pollock could have gone forward with his case? His very idea is that people like you and me, instead of being versed in at least one local tradition, find it easier to inhabit the comfort and enjoy the prestige of English. He could not persuade us in any other way than by addressing us in the language that we do know, else he would please himself, but matters would remain as they are.

Agree with you fully, Hash. Pollock could have addressed us in one of the Apabrahmsa languages, but who would have understood? Indeed, I was unaware of the term Apabrahmsa before I read Pollock's essay. What a great essay, by the way!

Nicholas Ostler is another scholar of Sanskrit I really admire. His book Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World charts the trajectory of all the successful languages of the world - languages that transcended their cultural boundaries. His self-contained 75-page chapter on Sanskrit, Charming Like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit, is a magical read. It tells much about structure of Sanskrit, how scholars like Panini - pardon the lack of proper accents, and hope none you is thinking of sandwiches - relentlessly analyzed its grammar. Indeed, as Ostler says, “the Sanskrit word for grammar, vyakarana, instead of being based, like the Greek grammatike, on some word for word or writing, just means analysis: so language is the subject for analysis par excellence.” Panini's ideas of grammar are so well formulated and abstract, they are similar to transactional format of the Turing machine in modern computing.

On a different note, I noticed you did not mention the Outlook Traveller essay in what was coming in the next weeks. In fact, the post where you promised it seems to have disappeared. Would love to see the essay.

Hari - Thanks for your thoughtful comment, and your very well-chosen quote, which I promptly took down in my notebook. You have mentioned the book by Ostler before; I must find it and read it now. The Outlook Traveller essay will be up for very soon. For a change I have too much material to be posted here!

There is a sort of preview of Sheldon Pollock's book in his article "Literary History, Indian History, World History":http://dsal.uchicago.edu/books/socialscientist/pager.html?issue=269-71&objectid=HN681.S597_269-71_114.gif

About Me

I am the author of the novel Arzee the Dwarf, (HarperCollins, 2009; New York Review Books 2013), and the editor of the anthology of Indian fiction India: A Traveler's Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press, 2010; HarperCollins India 2011). My book reviews appear in Mint, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

Here are my selections for the Fiction & Poetry section of The Caravan for the month of August: Dilip Kumar's short story "A...

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Named one of "60 Essential Works of Modern Indian literature in English" by World Literature Today. Shortlisted for the Commonwealth First Book Award 2010. Published in German (DTV) and Spanish (Plataforma) translations in 2012